I am starting to use pinterest more and more to organize visual materials and even more text-oriented material for classes. This board has a ton of different videos and image-related learning material.

Amanda Taub and Max Fisher write: "Time and again, communal hatreds overrun the [Facebook] newsfeed — the primary portal for news and information for many users — unchecked as local media are displaced by Facebook and governments find themselves with little leverage over the company. Some users, energized by hate speech and misinformation, plot real-world attacks.

Mary Reilley Clark's insight:

This was a fascinating and disheartening article that would be a great basis for a digital literacy lesson. (Pair it with this article.) Do students understand the goal of any social media site is to get them to spend more time there? And the reason for that is for the social media company to make money?

Last night I had dinner with cousins from Massachusetts. Their children, in middle and high school, talked about a school violence threat that spread via social media right after the March 14th walk-out to protest gun violence. It contained the same images as the fake threat that spread through our school district in California. I am sure that students could come up with several other examples of rumors that spread like wildfire through their social media.

At the end of the Times article, which details an attack on a Muslim restaurant after a video taped there goes viral, the owner of the restaurant is quoted about his own use of Facebook: “It’s not that I have more faith that social media is accurate, but you have to spend time and money to go to the market to get a newspaper,” he said. “I can just open my phone and get the news instead.”

Zeynep Tufekci writes: "What we are witnessing is the computational exploitation of a natural human desire: to look “behind the curtain,” to dig deeper into something that engages us. As we click and click, we are carried along by the exciting sensation of uncovering more secrets and deeper truths. YouTube leads viewers down a rabbit hole of extremism, while Google racks up the ad sales."

Mary Reilley Clark's insight:

I use YouTube purely for recreational purposes--and the occasional "how do I replace [insert random broken household item]"-- but I just spent some time looking at various controversial topics. Sure enough, click on one anti-vaccination video, and all the recommended videos become anti-vaxx, even though when I did a simple [vaccination] search, the first page of videos were predominately pro-vaccination.

When I teach about doing Internet research I always talk about staying focused, since it's so easy to get distracted by irrelevant sites. My example is always YouTube. I ask students to raise their hand if they've watched a YouTube video for fun. Then I ask them to raise their hand if they stopped at that one video. No one does. Now, instead of just emphasizing why that rabbit hole can cost them research time, I'll be asking students to be more aware of where that rabbit hole might take them.

There are many stand-alone lessons or units of work out there. Some schools “tick the box” by covering digital citizenship in the first few weeks of the school year and then move on.

I believe digital citizenship education is most beneficial when it is ongoing and authentic. A blogging program offers this.

I also believe that digital citizenship education should begin very early on, as soon as children begin accessing the internet.

Blogging allows a simple awareness of digital citizenship to start being developed at any age, even in kindergarten classrooms. Then, students can progressively build on their knowledge and skills.

Blogging can offer not only a safe space to practice digital citizenship, but also authentic dilemmas, discussions, and interactions. And hopefully blogging is something that’s weaved into your classroom program so it’s ongoing throughout the year."

Mary Reilley Clark's insight:

Our 7th graders are currently blogging about a novel they've all read, using an earlier post from The Edublogger as a framework. I would love to see teachers review this post with students and get them to reflect on these topics. We have addressed most of them in standalone digital citizenship lessons or when we introduced the project, but I think this would be a perfect blog topic for students!

I'd love to share the infographic and ask students for their interpretations of each of the topics before giving my input. I think it's important to show students how my reflection is constantly evolving. Just this week, I saw a tweet from Jennifer LaGarde about blogging. She mentioned that she gets fewer comments on her blog, but that engagement via social media is high. So my own thoughts about communication have changed, as I am one who comments less but reacts on social media more!

I'd love our 7th grade teachers to continue using student blogs after the Tangerine project is over. Perhaps this post will encourage them to think of other uses!

Andy Newman writes: "One of the most widely viewed pieces during Miami Art Week, the annual spectacle that ended on Sunday, was not to be found at the international art fair Art Basel Miami Beach or any of the galleries around town.

In it, a man from the Miami suburb of Hialeah goes to the bathroom and gives out a yelp. The video implies that when he sat on the toilet, he was bitten on the genitals by an iguana that crawled through the pipes.

The shaky footage shows the iguana peering out of the toilet and the man’s grandmother screaming as she chases it with a hair brush."

Mary Reilley Clark's insight:

What a great article to share in a media literacy lesson, although I'd start with the video and grab my students' attention. There's so much to explore here: the artist's use of myth told in modern form, how her work ..."requires the collaboration of unwitting news organizations," (and my favorite, the quote from the actor about not cluing his grandmother in to the entire farce: "Adrenaline keeps you young.")

Be sure to share a previous article by Newman about Zardulu. The two articles would certainly spark conversation. Is this fake news, or a new way to tell stories? I'd love to see our 6th graders use this as a jumping off point to retell Greek myths!

Known worldwide for her courage and clarity, Christiane Amanpour has spent the past three decades interviewing business, cultural and political leaders who have shaped history. In conversation with TED Curator Chris Anderson, Amanpour discusses fake news, objectivity in journalism, the leadership vacuum in global politics and more, sharing her wisdom along the way. "Be careful where you get information from," she says. "Unless we are all engaged as global citizens who appreciate the truth, who understand science, empirical evidence and facts, then we are going to be wandering around -- to a potential catastrophe."

Insurance scams, rumors of water shutoffs, and fake restrictions on when people can return are all bouncing around the internet.

Mary Reilley Clark's insight:

Some current news and social media to share with students to demonstrate why we need to check our sources. Also why, if it sounds too good or too crazy to be true, you're probably right! (Just be aware there's an F-bomb in one of the tweets. I wouldn't share the entire article with students.)

On Thursday, Alex Jones welcomed a guest to talk about how kidnapped children have been sent on a two-decade mission to space. NASA now denies the interplanetary conspiracy.

Mary Reilley Clark's insight:

OK, so this article might teeter on the edge of topics you'd feel uncomfortable discussing with middle schoolers, but there's enough here to make a great example for a media literacy lesson. The headline alone would be great a great clickbait example!

"Many sites offer personalized content selections, based on our browsing history, age, gender, location, and other data. The result is a flood of articles and posts that support our current opinions and perspectives to ensure that we enjoy what we see. Even when a site is not offering specifically targeted content, we all tend to follow people whose views align with ours. When those people share a piece of content, we can be sure it will be something we are also interested in.

That might not sound so bad, but filter bubbles create echo chambers. We assume that everyone thinks like us, and we forget that other perspectives exist." (Emphasis added.)

Mary Reilley Clark's insight:

Shane Parrish takes a deep dive into filter bubbles. I found several great quotes that I'll be using in a lesson on this topic. Some of the best:

I've always loved The New Yorker cartoon on internet anonymity. Parrish quotes Eli Pariser's book Filter Bubbles: "The new Internet doesn’t just know you’re a dog; it knows your breed and wants to sell you a bowl of premium kibble." What a great way to introduce this topic to middle schoolers!

Another quote from Pariser: "Your computer monitor is a kind of one-way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click."

Also Pariser: "Your identity shapes your media. There’s just one flaw in this logic: Media also shape identity. And as a result, these services may end up creating a good fit between you and your media by changing … you."

Pariser again: "Personalized filters play to the most compulsive parts of you, creating “compulsive media” to get you to click things more."

From a study on filter bubbles and voting by Jacob N. Shapiro: "The results of these experiments demonstrate that (i) biased search rankings can shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20% or more, (ii) the shift can be much higher in some demographic groups, and (iii) search ranking bias can be masked so that people show no awareness of the manipulation." (emphasis added.)

A quote from President Obama: "And increasingly, we become so secure in our bubbles that we start accepting only information, whether it’s true or not, that fits our opinions, instead of basing our opinions on the evidence that is out there."

And finally, a great summary for middle schoolers from Pariser: “A world constructed from the familiar is the world in which there's nothing to learn.”

Perry Bacon Jr. writes: "In the first part of our guide to unnamed sources, we laid out some general tips for making sense of these kinds of stories. In this part, we want to get more specific, to help you to essentially decode these stories. We also want you to be able to know which stories you should rely on based on the different kinds of sourcing used.

So we’re going to divide anonymous sources into six general types and give the pros and cons of each, in terms of reliability. We ordered the types of unnamed sources, roughly speaking, from most reliable to least reliable (at least in my experience.)"

Mary Reilley Clark's insight:

I'm not sure how many of my middle schoolers read news, either in a newspaper, magazine, or online (I am sure I'd be disappointed in the number!) This article would be good to share with high schoolers or middle school teachers who want to broaden their students' informational text reading.

The librarians at Washtenaw Community College are awesome! Their presentation can easily be adapted for secondary school students, and everything is shared via Google Drive. I shamelessly admit to coveting those buttons!

Sydney Ember writes: "Fake news — a neologism to describe stories that are just not true, like Pizzagate, and a term now co-opted to characterize unfavorable news — has given new urgency to the teaching of media literacy. Are Americans less able to assess credibility? Can they discern real news from disinformation?"

Image via Toa Heftiba on Unsplash.com

Mary Reilley Clark's insight:

I look forward to hearing more from Paul Mihailidis. I love the idea of not just teaching students to critique news but to understand that they have agency. This quote reminds me of Paul Fleischman's work in Eyes Wide Open: "Media literacy needs to be about connectivity, about engagement — and it needs to be intentionally civic." (Emphasis added.) Let's make sure this generation understands this!

"A recent study by North Carolina State University researchers finds that teaching critical thinking skills in a humanities course significantly reduces student beliefs in "pseudoscience" that is unsupported by facts."

Mary Reilley Clark's insight:

Teaching students to apply critical thinking skills across the curriculum is exactly what we do in the library! It's great to see research that supports what we do every day.

Michael McGough writes: "This week in the world of fake news, a recent satiric post criticizing California Gov. Jerry Brown for passing a fictional law made some readers laugh, angered others, and likely prompted some people to brush up on their math lingo."

Mary Reilley Clark's insight:

I discovered this article via The Sift, which provides a Viral Rumor Rundown full of examples for discussions on digital and media literacy. Here's a link to their archives. It's well worth subscribing to their newsletter!

... that the Image search now has a set of colored rectangles just below the query area. Here's an example with a simple query. See those rectangles? They're called "chips," and they modify the image query."

Mary Reilley Clark's insight:

I just love Dan Russell's blog! I am always learning new things to share with students. This is a quick lesson to share, but can really help students find just the right image. You can click on several of the chips to further refine your search. I searched [sunsets], then added [Eiffel Tower] and finally [clouds] to find this beautiful photo. (Of course, I first limited my search to images labeled for noncommercial reuse!)

It's also a lesson in how search engines change rapidly, so we all should periodically pause and look over what's new. I've seen the chips on Amazon, and coincidentally, while I was searching for a new cast iron skillet, just like Dan.

So, not a life-changing thing to share, but it certainly might help students with searches, or spark some new ideas for their search query.

Nicholas Carr writes: "So you bought that new iPhone. If you’re like the typical owner, you’ll be pulling your phone out and using it some 80 times a day, according to data Apple collects. That means you’ll be consulting the glossy little rectangle nearly 30,000 times over the coming year. Your new phone, like your old one, will become your constant companion and trusty factotum — your teacher, secretary, confessor, guru. The two of you will be inseparable."

Mary Reilley Clark's insight:

There is so much to digest in this article. When we think we don't need to remember facts because we have Google, are we changing the way we think? The most thought-provoking quote: "As the brain grows dependent on the technology, the research suggests, the intellect weakens."

This article pairs well with Cal Newport's book Deep Work and makes me want to break up with my phone--a bit. I will at least set it to silent and try to leave it out of the room when I work.

From Claire Cain Miller, on the image above on the left : “It really feels like an image about power, about freedom, about trusting oneself,” said Pam Grossman, director of visual trends at Getty Images. “Who cares what you even look like? Let’s focus on what you’re doing.”

Mary Reilley Clark's insight:

What a great article to share with students! (I'm not too worried about the towel-clad woman in middle school.) When I choose photos for presentations to students, I am very deliberate about choosing diverse images of people. This article would be a great conversation starter for a media literacy lesson!

Christa Forster writes: "In the month leading up to our study of Shakespeare’s plays “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “Othello,” I use the “What’s Going On in This Picture?” activity in my ninth- and 10th-grade English classes to help prepare students to read the plays and to write the analytical papers that are the culmination of our Shakespeare unit.

The activity also prepares students to think critically and creatively about how to physically embody a character from the play to prepare for the group performance activity they’ll also do."

What a great way to get students to analyze and think critically! Students aren't the only ones who feel uncomfortable when they interact with unfamiliar text or images. Having a strategy to analyze new material can help students move past that initial feeling of discomfort, which is where many of them give up. I love the simplified version of VTS cited here:

Valeriya Safronova writes: "Frank Ocean gave a rare, intimate performance at Panorama Music Festival on Friday that enraptured his fans — and had some unexpected consequences that went far beyond music.

Four days later the event has raised questions around the issue of copyright in an era of viral sharing and what happens to a young, creative business when placed in the spotlight."

Mary Reilley Clark's insight:

An interesting view of copyright and media literacy. I like this idea from Christine Weller, an intellectual property rights attorney: ' “There’s an open question about whether a short, pithy tweet falls under copyright protection.” Her suggestion: When in doubt, reach out.' I imagine high schoolers would be more engaged in a discussion of this rather than some plagiarized term papers!

Terry Heick writes: "... in an increasingly connected and digital world, the things a student needs to know are indeed changing—fundamental human needs sometimes drastically redressed for an alien modern world. Just as salt allowed for the keeping of meats, the advent of antibiotics made deadly viruses and diseases simply inconvenient, and electricity completely altered when and where we slept and work and played, technology is again changing the kind of “stuff” a student needs to know."

I wish we had a class in digital literacy, because these 63 points could be the bedrock of the curriculum. In the meantime, I will be sharing this list with my Library Advisory Board. I'd love to see them develop short videos for our TV news on specific topics or infographics to display in the library.

Ana Homayoun writes: "Many people — adults and kids alike — view likes, loves, comments and followers as a barometer for popularity, even within a smaller, closed group. Teens can quickly get caught up in the feedback loop, posting and sharing images and videos that they believe will gain the largest reaction. Over time, teens’ own values may become convoluted within an online world of instantaneous feedback, and their behavior online can become based on their “all about the likes” values rather than their real-life values."

Mary Reilley Clark's insight:

Let's work to teach (and show) students that validation doesn't come from likes on social media. Also, let's take over memes for educational use, too! I'd love to see students creating memes for historical figures or characters in novels.

Julia Belluz writes: "Long before Hilda Bastian was a health researcher, she endorsed a practice she believes may have cost lives.

“I think people died because of me,” she said recently. “And I'll spend my whole life trying not to do it again and to make amends.”

In the 1980s, Bastian was skeptical of the medical establishment. As the head of Homebirth Australia, she traveled the country and appeared on TV programs arguing that moms should have their babies outside the cold confines of hospital rooms."

Mary Reilley Clark's insight:

Belluz shares several lessons learned by medical researchers and doctors in fighting misinformation about health issues.

Take time to explain your beliefs (shouting that someone else is wrong doesn't work, oddly enough.)

Make sure your information is reliable and accessible (This is where WE come in! It can be frustrating to attempt to clarify a position when faced with too many sources. That reference librarian who helped you find a microfiche 20 years ago? She's now combing the internet and databases to find what you need!)

Teach them while they're young. Again, our role is crucial in helping students develop critical thinking skills when evaluating information.

Evidence is necessary but not sufficient. In this case, medical research can't happen in a vacuum. In education, the comparisons of the American and Finnish school systems don't work, when we realize how profound the impacts of stress and poverty on IQ are.

Don't be afraid to hold those spreading misinformation to account. This is a tough one for students, but can you imagine how powerful it would be? Just like the students who made the 13 Reasons Why Not videos, our students need to know they can engage with, respond to and fight back against misleading or false stories.

My 7th graders love this lesson. When they take notes, I tell them to leave space for a title, which they will come up with after the presentation. I'm constantly mixing things up on this lesson (just added the EasyBib Website Evaluator link after a co-worker in my district found it during a library conference this week.) Today one class was very focused on the fake news slide, so I had them come up with a clickbait headline for their notes. It certainly generated more conversation than when I asked for a title!

Most classes go to the computers after the presentation and look at Media Bias Fact Check to choose two news sources that are far right and far left, then compare stories on similar topics. If I have time, I let students work in pairs, so each student reads one article, takes notes and summarizes. I ask them to focus on word choice, since often the only difference in the articles are the adjectives used.

I added detailed notes at the bottom of the slides. Feel free to make a copy and use, share or modify.

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